Brent A. Jones

Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen, changed my life. Not because I’m good at it — I still have a long way to go — but because it made being a productive person and accomplishing a lot of awesome stuff seem within reach.

I think there are two main reasons it appeals to me:

1. It doesn’t make judgments about what it is you want to do. The process is entirely independent of the inputs and outputs. It’s the difference between a diet that says “you can only have these particular foods — those over there are off limits” and one that says “look, I’m not going to tell you what to eat, but if you want to lose weight you need to consume less than this amount of whatever it is you choose”.

2. It’s a simple algorithm that handles a complex series of inputs (any information or thoughts that command your attention at any time), outputting a series of lists with defined, simple instructions for making progress on the inputs. To use another example, imagine walking into your kitchen and telling the Food-O-Matic 2000 that you want dinner. It takes that input and generates a series of questions: Chicken, steak or pork? You push the button for steak. A slider appears: Rare, to medium, to well-done. You slide it to your preference. A series of checkboxes: Steak sauce, sauteed mushrooms, onions, cheese. Finally, a set of sides: Baked potato, mashed potato, sweet potato, green beans, macaroni and cheese, dinner roll, salad. You make your selection, a door opens and out pops dinner. The algorithm took a fairly complex input “I’m hungry. What do I want to eat?” and boiled it down to a series of discrete steps. Of course Getting Things Done takes a little more thinking — and of course there’s the actual doing — but not by much.

I never was into self-help books, programming your mind, positive feedback and all that stuff. Figured I was happy enough, and when I wasn’t a book wasn’t likely to tell me how to make it all better. I’m still there to a certain degree, but as I said, this book literally changed my life. How?

Mainly a simple, logical progression of ideas that all made sense and which I was able to try out simply, and the benefits of which are immediately apparent. Allen starts this in the very first chapter, an introduction to the ideas he’s about to present. He provides a simple exercise to display the power of this way of thinking. It consists of three steps:

1. Write down the project or situation that is most on your mind — an upcoming vacation, a project at work, a situation at home that needs to be dealt with.

2. Write down the successful outcome — how you would know that this thing was resolved, what it would look like so you could check it off a to-do list, what the goal is.

3. Now, — and I have to quote this part, because it’s stated so simply and powerfully — “write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward.” Not what you need to think about, but exactly what you need to do next — calling someone, writing an email, searching for a specific bit of information, moving something from one place to another, these are all potential next actions.

Just doing that exercise in the first chapter of the book provided me with a small sense of clarity and realization: part of what keeps us from reaching our full potential isn’t so much that we have too many things to do or that we don’t know what we should do or that we don’t know how to do the things we want, it’s that we aren’t thinking about those things in an efficient and productive manner.

You probably remember a basic chemistry experiment where you mix two chemicals together and get a reaction, then mix the two again but this time add a third, and the reaction happens faster or more vigorously. You added the catalyst (and sometimes the reaction won’t happen at all without the catalyst) — this book, this way of thinking adds the catalyst. It boosts you over the threshold of inactivity and spurs you on to action: It’s easy to ignore something like “plan vacation” because where do you start?

It’s a lot harder to ignore “fill out time off form for work”, “write up packing list”, “call mechanic (555-1541) to have car checked out”, “email Jim to ask him to check on the house”, “call hotel (555-2424) for reservations July 9-14”. Those things are simple: You no longer have to think about them or how to do them, you just do them. You could be completely zapped at the end of a long week of work and manage to tap out an email to Jim, or call the hotel to book a room. It would be much harder to be wiped out after a long day and then sit down to try and “plan vacation”.

The final thing that’s great about this way of thinking is that it’s platform agnostic. It’s not a fancy system where you buy a leather portfolio and paper refills every six months, and the special pen to go along with it. In its most basic form, you need paper and a writing implement. That’ll get you started. You can of course add on to it — a file cabinet and related accoutrements are helpful, for example. Part of my system lives in various online forms: Google Calendar and a self-hosted to-do application. People do Getting Things Done out of fancy leather binders, on index cards held together by binder clips, in Moleskine Notebooks, in text files on their computer or in more robust applications. But none of that is necessary: Check out the book from your local public library, grab a bunch of paper from your printer and the nearest pen and you’re ready to go for zero dollars.

Anyhow, the impetus for all this is that one of the blogs I read on a regular basis, The Simple Dollar, is doing a very thorough, in-depth review of Getting Things Done. Check it out — it just might change your life.